Links

May 2, 2024

In 2020, online wor­ship went from a fringe nov­el­ty to a mass phe­nom­e­non. It’s def­i­nite­ly an option that’s here to stay and British Friends have now inte­grat­ed one online wor­ship group ful­ly into the month­ly meet­ing struc­ture (has any oth­er year­ly meet­ing done this already?). It’ll be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how this con­tin­ues to develop.

I was remiss in shar­ing the March Quak­ers Today pod­cast, which looked at Quak­ers, Birds, and Jus­tice. Friends have long been espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in the nat­ur­al world. One of the inter­vie­wees is Rebec­ca Hei­der, who wrote A Quak­er Guide to Bird­watch­ing in last mon­th’s issue of FJ.

Visiting new meetings online

September 23, 2022

A brand new video from Quak­er­S­peak, “What to Expect at a Hybrid Quak­er Meet­ing for Wor­ship,“ con­vinc­ing­ly high­lights the ben­e­fits of online wor­ship. As Robin Mohr says:

One of the things we’ve learned in the last cou­ple of years is that it is eas­i­er to vis­it a new Quak­er meet­ing that’s far away because of the oppor­tu­ni­ties set up through online wor­ship, and we’ve seen a lot of peo­ple go back to vis­it a meet­ing they vis­it­ed before or to be able to vis­it some­place they’ve always heard about but nev­er been to, and that has been a gift to our community. 

Is Quaker Culture an Obstacle to Faith?

February 2, 2019

From Isaac Smith:

I have tend­ed to describe this shift in under­stand­ing as the moment when Quak­erism “clicked” for me — when it ceased to be just the weird sub­cul­ture I grew up in, and more a mat­ter of con­vic­tion. Prac­tices that I ignored or nev­er quite under­stood, like mak­ing group deci­sions with­out tak­ing a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs. 

Isaac’s piece stems in part from the Decem­ber Friends Jour­nal, on Quak­ers and Chris­tian­i­ty. A large per­cent­age of the sub­mis­sions we received for the issue had remark­ably sim­i­lar per­son­al sto­ries: peo­ple had grown up in a restric­tive reli­gious tra­di­tion and come to Lib­er­al Friends because of its open­ness to spir­i­tu­al seek­ing. If any­thing they were hos­tile to Chris­tian­i­ty and dis­tinc­tive Quak­er pecu­liar­i­ties when they joined but over time they slow­ly shift­ed, often after get­ting to know ground­ed elder Friends. Now they qui­et­ly iden­ti­fied as Chris­t­ian Friends.

We could have print­ed a whole issue of (most­ly) con­vinced Lib­er­al Friends who had redis­cov­ered Chris­tian­i­ty. Instead we picked a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple for the print edi­tion and pub­lished the rest as part of our our extend­ed online edi­tion; you can read it all at the online con­tents. Although Isaac’s sto­ry is dif­fer­ent (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a sim­i­lar trajectory.

(Issac also has some ques­tions about Quak­er pub­lish­ing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Mau­r­er. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pon­der­ing on my part).

Is Quak­er Cul­ture an Obsta­cle to Faith?

Help keep the work going!

January 8, 2019

If you spend much time online you’ll know that there’s a lot of noise and bad infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. This is true with Quak­er mate­r­i­al too. Every day I’m scan­ning the cor­ners of the net to find the blog posts, Red­dit threads, Quak­er mag­a­zines and main­stream cov­er­age of Friends and bring­ing it on Quak­erQuak­er and my Quak­er­Ran­ter Dai­ly Email.

Var­i­ous Jan­u­ary serv­er bills are com­ing due in the next week and the Pay­pal account is emp­ty. Between domain reg­is­tra­tions, serv­er bills, and the Ning ser­vice the site can often rack up over $50 in a giv­en month.

Please con­sid­er a one-time dona­tion at http://​pay​pal​.me/​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​e​l​ley or use the Quak­erQuak­er dona­tion page to set up a month­ly donation.

A Racially Diverse Society of Friends?

January 2, 2019

The Jan­u­ary issue of Friends Jour­nal is online. I wrote the intro this month so I’ll just quote myself:

In recent years, a num­ber of Black Friends Jour­nal con­trib­u­tors have shared heart­break­ing sto­ries of not feel­ing wel­come in Quak­er cir­cles. As we planned this issue, we self-consciously added a ques­tion mark to the end of its title — “A Racial­ly Diverse Soci­ety of Friends?” The choice of punc­tu­a­tion hints at a cer­tain weari­ness — are we real­ly still ask­ing this? — along with the sug­ges­tion that maybe many Friends are con­tent enough with the sta­tus quo that they might sim­ply answer “no” to a call for diversity. 

What are Quaker Values? Here are some answers.

May 2, 2018

A new issue of Friends Jour­nal is up online: “What Are Quak­er Val­ues Any­way?” The phrase “Quak­er val­ues” has become a com­mon way to explain our con­nec­tion to one anoth­er but I won­der if we’re using it too casu­al­ly (I talked more of “Quak­er brand­ing” in an Editor’s Desk post try­ing to drum up sub­mis­sions). This issue also has writ­ing from our fifth annu­al (fifth?!?) Stu­dent Voic­es Project. I’m real­ly hap­py how the issue came out. You can read much of it online with­out a subscription: